Plane floods with water: Qantas flight aisle a river at 36,000-feet over Pacific

A Qantas flight, destined for Melbourne, was forced to return to Los angeles after water leaked on the plane. The trouble started about an hour after the aircraft departed from LAX.

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Things can go wrong during a flight, but you would never expect to find yourself in a flood at 36,000 feet over the ocean. This is what the passengers on a Qantas flight experienced at 36,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. Passengers said this was frightening as the aisles filled up with water from a stream of water gushing from the passenger cabin walls.

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USA Today reports on July 3 that suddenly people started jumping up out of their seats yelling because the water was rushing into the middle of the aircraft. Water dripped down the aircraft's steps and got the folks on the lower level wet. This happened about an hour into the flight.

One Flight 94 passenger told the media that it was the scariest thing she’d ever seen. The passenger said her immediate thoughts were that there “shouldn’t be water in an electrical thing in the air.” She’s right, there shouldn’t have been water, but when a pipe burst, the water has to go somewhere, suggests AOL Travel.

The pipe that burst carried clean drinking water, so at least the passengers weren’t dealing with unsanitary conditions on top of a flood. The plane’s aisle looked like a river as the water rippled like a tide coming in and gleamed under the cabin lighting.

The pilot turned the plane around and headed back to LAX. The plane left LAX at 12:15 a.m. and landed safely back at the airport with a water saturated cabin and relieved passengers to get back on the ground. Qantas said that the passengers were never in any danger.

While there were no concerns for the flight’s safety, the pilot opted to turn back “in the interest of passenger comfort.”One passenger said that the pilot’s decision to turn the plane around made sense because they still had 15 hours to go in this flight and the water played havoc with some of the amenities usually expected on the flight. They couldn’t put the movie on and they couldn’t feed the passengers because of the water gushing.

The airline attendants were great, passengers said. They moved people around the best that they could to keep them for having to put their feet in the water. They provided spare blankets for the passenger to keep dry. Actress Nicole Brown was on the flight and she tweeted:

“Pipe burst on my #Qantas flight over the Pacific. We were diverted back to LA. River running thru the aisles #ScaryTimes #WillKeepYouPosted”

Other passengers posted their account of the flood this flight on Twitter accounts. You have to admit this is an event not ordinarily seen. The last thing you would expect at 36,000 feet in the air is a flood.

Passengers didn’t need to worry about all the water in the passenger cabin causing the plane to carry extra weight because the water was on board to begin with. Probably the biggest concern would be the electrical in the plane, as one passenger stated when talking to the media. Worries that the water would short something out seemed feasible. One passenger put on their Twitter page that it was “raining in the plane.”

Once back at LAX, Qantas put the passengers up in a hotel until another flight was made available to them. They also apologized for the very wet inconvenience.

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Roz Zurko is a freelance writer originally from Milford, Conn. Today she writes from her home at the foot of the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Her articles have appeared in magazines, newspapers and online. She has been a guest author on BBC radio and her online articles are read by more than a million people each month.